Facts

A collection of our favourite facts.

• China has more than 100 cities with a population over a million (which is the equivalent of Liverpool and Manchester combined).

• Australia is wider than the moon.

• Within half a century of his death in 1953, Ibn Saud, the founder of the Saudi dynasty, had more than three thousand descendants.

• Nintendo (founded 1889) and the Ottoman Empire coexisted for 33 years. However the oldest company in the world is Kongo Gumi, a construction company in Japan that was formed in 578AD and has been running for nearly 1,500 years.

• Dame Judi Dench was born a month before Elvis Presley.

• In just two years - 2018 and 2019 - China produced nearly the same amount of cement (4.4 billion tons) as did the United States during the entire 20th century.

• Due to a shortage of trucks and horses in WW2, the Soviet Army would often resort to using fleets of camels. Even during the battle of Stalingrad, Bactrian camels were relied upon to deliver ammunition and oil to the city.

• Under China's one child policy, enforced between 1980 and 2015, approximately 196 million sterilisations were performed, regularly under coercion.

• Edith Piaf was only 4 ft 8 inches tall.

• Levi's does not have a definitive explanation for why their famous jeans are called '501,' as the company paperwork was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

• In 1865, during the first American oil boom, one parcel of land in Pennsylvania sold for $2 million. Sadly, the oil dried up in less than a year, and that same parcel of land was sold thirteen years later for just $4.

• J. Paul Getty, who was once the richest private citizen in the world, was a notorious miser. He had a payphone installed in his 72 room Tudor mansion, so that guests would have to pay for their own calls.

• More than 440 billion farmed prawns and shrimp are killed for human consumption each year - that's over five times the number of all farmed land animals combined. However, this number is dwarfed by the amount of wild shrimp also killed by humans each year, with a mean estimate of 25 trillion...

• In 1931 Irish pharmacist Thomas Smith developed a product for treating nappy rash and skin conditions, which he would go on to call 'Soothing Cream.' But due to the Dublin accent locals pronounced it 'Sudocrem,' leading him to change the name of the product in 1950.

• In the late 19th century France planned to flood the Sahara desert and create an inland sea.

• It's estimated that the United States operates around 750 overseas military bases in at least 80 countries. China only has one (officially acknowledged) base, in Djibouti.

• The Amazon river is 4,300 miles long and flows through nine countries, yet not a single bridge crosses it.

• Cigarette lighters were invented before matches.

• In 1997, the UK economy was larger than China and India's combined.

• Robert Wadlow, the tallest person on record, wore size 37 shoes.

• The Kingdom of Congo had an arbitrary taxation system ~ one tax was collected every time the King's hat fell off.

• In 1989 the Soviet Union struck a strange deal with Pepsi. As Soviet rubles were worthless internationally, they decided to pay for the soft drink by sending the company 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate and a destroyer. For a brief moment, Pepsi owned one of the largest attack fleets in the world.

• If Britain were to join America, and become the 51st state, we'd be the poorest state in the union (based on GDP per capita). Poorer than Louisiana, Alabama and even Mississippi.

• As well as being married to Elvis, Priscilla Presley has also dated Robert Kardashian, Julio Iglesias, Richard Gere, Nigel Lithgoe (Nasty Nigel from the TV show Pop Idol) and DJ Toby Anstis.

• Oxford University was founded 300 years before the Aztec Empire.

• The population of New York in 1800 was just 60,000 people. Baltimore was the third largest city in the US with 26,000 inhabitants.

• The average annual salary of a UPS delivery driver in America is now $170,000.

• Canada has more lakes than all the other countries in the world combined.

• The obstetric forceps were invented by a family of French Huguenot surgeons called the Chamberlens, who migrated to England in 1569. Their special device helped to make difficult births much safer, which in turn brought them power and prestige, so they decided to keep their new instrument secret - even when delivering royal princes and princesses, they insisted that the forceps be brought into the room in a lined box, which would only be opened when everyone had left the room and the mother had been blindfolded. The family kept their forceps secret for nearly 150 years, leaving everyone else to suffer without them.

• The most common search query on Bing is 'Google'.

• The average life expectancy in Russia in 1921 was just 23 years old. 

• Before the rise of Hitler's NSDAP party, 'Nazi' was used as a derogatory term in Germany, referring to an awkward, backwards, clumsy country bumpkin - it was derived from the first name Ignatz, a common name in Bavaria where the NSDAP emerged. People later started using it as an insult to mock the NSDAP, as it also sounded like the start of the German slang words for National and Socialists ('Na-Sozi'). That's why Hitler and the elites of the party didn't refer to themselves as Nazis.

• In 1833, Britain spent 40% of the treasury's annual budget compensating slave owners for their freed slaves (to put that in context, we currently spend 20% of the budget on the entire NHS).

• A book entitled "How To Make Sure that the Elderly Have Happy, Healthy Retirements" was first printed in China in 1085, and is still in print 1,000 years later.

• John Tyler, the 10th US President, was born in 1790 but his grandson is still alive today.

• Owing to the vast range of options at Starbucks (from cup size to type of milk to toppings), there are 383 billion different ways of ordering a latte.

• In an early draft of The Lord Of The Rings, Aragorn wore wooden clogs and was named Trotter.

• Albert Einstein once claimed that aside from General Relativity, the best idea he ever had was to boil eggs in his soup, thus saving on washing up.

• Cleopatra lived closer in time to the creation of the iPhone, than the creation of the Great Pyramids of Giza.

• The American state of Wyoming is roughly twice the size of England, but has only 1% of our population. So while England has a population density of 1,124 people per square mile, Wyoming contains just 6 people per square mile. However, the country with the lowest population density is Greenland, which is over 16 times larger than England and is home to just 57,000 people, giving it a population density of 0.07 people per square mile.

• Japan has an obesity rate of just 5%, compared to 27% in the UK, 36% in the U.S, and almost 60% in American Samoa and Nauru (the 13 most obese countries in the world are all in Oceania). Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan all have a higher obesity rate than the UK.

• Less than 20% of Japanese citizens hold a valid passport (it's nearly 90% in the UK).

• When Botswana gained its independence in 1966, only 22 people in the country had been to university, only 100 were high school graduates, and there were only 12km of paved roads. It now has a higher GDP per capita than South Africa.

• The phrase 'often a bridesmaid, never a bride' originated from a 1925 Listerine mouthwash advertisement.

• Loch Ness contains more water than all of the lakes, rivers and reservoirs in England and Wales combined.

• 30% of all the births in England and Wales in 2022 were to non-UK-born mothers. In London this figure was 67%.

• Due to the intense pressure, a male honey bee's penis explodes during sex, resulting in a popping sound that is audible to humans. Extreme heat can also bring on the process, causing bees to convulse, simultaneously ejaculate and, sadly, die.

• Five famous companies that originally sold a completely different product: Shell - originally imported seashells (hence the name). Nintendo - originally sold playing cards. Tiffany's - originally sold stationery. Samsung - began as a grocery store, selling noodles and dried fish. Nokia - started as a pulp mill.

• 15% of all daily Google searches have never been Googled before.

• The Argentine ant forms massive colonies, dubbed supercolonies. One of these supercolonies stretches over 3,728 miles, from Italy, through France and on to Spain.

• A.A. Milne, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Harold Macmillan, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Otto Frank (Anne Frank's father) and Adolf Hitler all fought at the battle of the Somme.

• In 1953 the average UK house cost £1,891, in 2020 it had risen to £252,000. In 1953 the average UK house could be bought for 150 ounces of gold, but in 2020 it could still be bought for just 150 ounces of gold. The pound has lost more than 99% of its purchasing power in 70 years.

• The most densely wooded county in England is Surrey.

• Saudi Arabia are currently using one fifth of all the steel produced in the world to build Neom, their new high-tech city. They are also preparing to begin construction on a cube-shaped skyscraper in Riyadh, which will be large enough to fit 20 Empire State Buildings inside.

• The term 'quarantine' originates from the Italian word quaranta, meaning forty. During the 14th Century, when the black death was at its peak, ships arriving in Venice from plague-infected areas were required to anchor offshore for forty days before docking, to prevent the spread of the disease.

• The name Pakistan is an acronym of its regions - Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh and Baluchistan.

• Before ruling China, Mao Zedong worked as a primary school teacher. Benito Mussolini and Pol Pot were also teachers as well (not at the same school).

• Haagen-Dazs sounds like a Scandinavian phrase but is actually meaningless. According to its American creator Reuben Mattus, who was originally born in Poland, he wanted a Danish sounding name as a tribute to Denmark's exemplary treatment of its Jews during the Second World War (he also felt that Denmark was known for its dairy products and had a positive image in the United States). Reuben would sit at the kitchen table for hours saying nonsensical words, until he finally came up with...Haagen-Dazs.

• For those wondering why the UK doesn't build infrastructure anymore: 'The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages and the application process alone has cost £297 million.'

• More Soviet soldiers died at the Battle of Stalingrad than the combined total of British, French and American military deaths throughout WW2.

• A blue whale's blood vessels are so huge a human could swim through them.

• The term nepotism comes from the Latin root 'nepos,' meaning nephew, and the term originated with the popes who weren't technically allowed to sire their own offspring so they would look to promote their nephews instead.

• Scientists still don't understand how bicycles stay upright.

• The average house price in the UK has more than tripled since 2001.

• In WW2 there were three divisions of Bosnian and Albanian muslims in the Nazi army, who would wear fez hats decorated in SS runes.

• The longest prison sentence in history was handed to Chamoy Thipyaso, a Thai lady guilty of mass fraud - she was sentenced to 141,078 years in jail. However, due to Thailand's limitations on maximum sentences, she only ever served 8 years.

• The first recorded advertisement was a papyrus created in 3000 BC by a fabric merchant named Hapu in ancient Egypt. The papyrus offered a reward for the capture and return of an escaped slave named Shem, while also describing Hapu's shop and the carpets he sold.

• Famous names who were fostered or adopted: Marilyn Monroe, Steve Jobs, Nelson Mandela, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, Babe Ruth, Mike Tyson, Simone Biles, James Brown, Debby Harry, John Lennon, James Dean, Jamie Foxx, Pierce Brosnan, Cher, Oprah Winfrey, Eddie Murphy, Keegan-Michael Key, John Thompson, Stewart Lee, Kathy Burke, Steven Berkoff, Neil Morrissey, Bill Clinton, Michael Gove, Lorraine Pascale, Seal, J.R.R Tolkien, Bertrand Russell, Aristotle and David Dickinson.

• Russell Crowe's dog in the movie Gladiator also played Wellard in Eastenders.

• The Greenland shark's life expectancy is between 250-500 years, and the females don't reach reproductive age until they're 150 years old (with the gestation potentially taking up to 18 years). So there might currently be a Greenland shark swimming around the arctic ocean that was born during the reign of King Henry VIII.

• South Africa has a population of 60 million people, but 18.4 million are on welfare benefits, and only 7 million are taxpayers.

• The next season of European football will be the first since 1930/31 to not feature one of the trio of Sir Stanley Mathews, Peter Shilton or Gianluigi Buffon.

• Liverpool and Bristol are both East of Edinburgh.

• Not only did the Americans send up primates to test their rockets in the 1940s and 50s, but they would also strap black bears into rocket-powered sleds to test the physical effects of ultra-rapid acceleration and deceleration.

• There are now more MPs in the House of Commons who served in Gordon Brown's cabinet, than were in Boris Johnson's cabinet when he resigned.

• To cater for the Olympians and their healthy diets, this year's Olympic Village has stocked up on nearly 3 million bananas.

• P Diddy's cellmate is Sam Bankman-Fried.

• There's currently enough clothing circulating globally to clothe the next six generations of the human race.

• 40% of the world's languages have fewer than 1,000 native speakers.

• The Saxe-Coburg family dynasty was so dominant in Europe that in 1901, the year of Queen Victoria's death, her family members also sat on the thrones of Austria-Hungary, Russia, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Sweden and Norway.

• Over six million Germans were registered unemployed when Hitler became chancellor in 1933. By 1939 this figure was just 34,000.

• In 166 residential areas of London, the police have failed to solve a single neighbourhood crime for the past three years.

• As Chicago was built on very flat, low-lying ground, it was difficult to install a successful sewage system. So in the 1850s and 1860s, they decided to lift all of the buildings into the air (by an average of 10 feet) and pop the new pipes underneath.However, business as usual would be maintained during the move, with people dining, shopping and working in these buildings as they were rollered down the street.

• In Europe, starting in the Middle Ages and running almost all the way to the twentieth century, the prevailing wisdom on hygiene maintained that submerging the body in water was a distinctly unhealthy, even dangerous thing. Clogging one's pores with dirt and oil allegedly protected you from disease. So as a child, King Louis XIII was not bathed until he was seven years old.

• September 26th is the most common birthday in the UK, Boxing Day the least common. There is also a surprising dip on April 1st, with parents seemingly keen to avoid having a baby on April Fool's Day.

• It became known as the red light district because prostitutes would use a red light to hide their rashes and any visible evidence of their sexually transmitted diseases.

• Eunuchs have often played a large part in Chinese culture and government. During the Han dynasty eunuchs didn't just have their testicles removed but their penises as well. If they survived this rudimentary operation they were often at least partly incontinent, urinating through quills they kept in their hair.

• In the first five years of the 80s, there were 146 weeks when a “Band” was at number 1 in the UK. In the first five years of the 1990s, there were 141 weeks when a band was at number 1. So far, in the first four-and-a-half years of the 2020s, there's been only 3 weeks when a band has been at number 1. (Those bands were the Radio 1 Live Lounge collaboration “band,” The Beatles, and Little Mix.)

• Before Colonel Sanders began KFC he had various other jobs, including (in chronological order): painting horse carriages; working as a farmhand; employed as a streetcar conductor; a soldier; a blacksmith; a steam engine stoker (fired for insubordination); a railroad labourer; a stoker for a different railroad (fired for fighting); a lawyer (fired for a courtroom brawl with his own client); a life insurance salesman (fired for insubordination); established a ferry boat company; started a company manufacturing acetylene lamps; became a tyre salesman; ran a petrol station; tried his hand as a motel owner; and finally moved into restaurants, where he was soon involved in a shootout with a local competitor (who was later arrested for murder). He was still sleeping in his car 20 years later, as he tried to get his franchise up and running. By the time of his death there were 6,000 KFC outlets in 48 countries.

• Alumni of Eton College include: 20 British Prime Ministers; Princes William and Harry, as well as royals and aristocrats from six continents; writers George Orwell, Ian Fleming, Aldous Huxley and Percy Bysshe Shelley; actors Hugh Laurie, Tom Hiddleston, Damian Lewis, Eddie Redmayne and Dominic West; musicians Frank Turner and Atticus Ross; and other famous names like Ranulph Fiennes, John Maynard Keynes, Guy Burgess, Douglas Murray, Kwasi Kwarteng, Rory Stewart, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Bear Grylls.
  

• For a developed country to broadly maintain its current population (without immigration), there needs to be a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. The country with the highest fertility rate in the world is currently Niger, averaging nearly 7 children per woman. The country with the lowest fertility rate is South Korea, averaging 0.78 children per woman. South Koreans are so concerned about their population decline, that one construction firm (the Booyoung Group in Seoul) are offering both their male and female employees a $75,000 payout each time they have a child, no strings attached.
  

• While few people have heard of American engineer Thomas Midgley Junior, he's been described as having 'the most adverse impact on the atmosphere of any single organism in Earth's history.'
  

  Why? Because not only was Thomas responsible for putting lead in petrol, which would have dire consequences for the world, but he followed this up by inventing CFC's - the gases that would go on to destroy the O-Zone layer.He died in 1944 after strangling himself in a device he had invented to help him out of bed (although the coroner later declared this to be suicide).
  

• The country with the tallest average height is the Netherlands, with men averaging over 6 ft and women over 5 ft 7. At the other end of the spectrum, the country of Timor Leste has the smallest average height, with men averaging just 5 ft 3 and women 5 ft. According to a study from 2019, the UK is the 47th tallest country in the world, with men averaging 5 ft 10 and women 5 ft 4 1/2. However, the average height in the UK has fluctuated over time. In 1870, the average height for men in the UK was 5 ft 5, but there's reason to believe people were actually taller in 200 AD, during the Roman occupation, and our average height got smaller over time.
  

• With 79 letters, 'Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft' is often considered to be the longest word in the German language (although longer words can technically be formed). It means 'Association for Subordinate Officials of the Main Maintenance Building of the Danube Steam Shipping Electrical Services.'
  

  The longest words from other languages include: Lithuanian - nebeprisikiškiakopūstlapiaujančiuosiuose ('In those, of masculine gender, who aren't gathering enough wood sorrel's leaves by themselves anymore.') Arabic - فَإِستَسقَينَاكُمُوهما ('Did we ask you to let us drink it?') Swedish - Realisationsvinstbeskattning ('Capital gains taxation.') Hebrew - וכשלאנציקלופדיותינו ('And when to our encyclopedias...') French - hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobie ('A fear of long words.')
  

• It might not look like they're under much stress, but the average heart rate of an F1 driver, during a 90-minute race, is 170 bpm. Some drivers will even peak at 200 bpm (remember, that's the average across 90 minutes - with no breaks). Drivers can also lose up to 8lbs of fluid during a race, sweating in cockpits known to reach temperatures of 60 degrees Celsius.
  

  As if that wasn't enough, they also regularly experience extreme G-forces, such as 6.5 G when cornering. To put that in perspective, Apollo 16 only experienced 7 G on reentry to Earth's atmosphere. However, the highest G force ever survived by a human being was a whopping 214 G, experienced by IndyCar racer Kenny Brack during this chaotic crash in 2003.
  

• People have always looked for ingenious ways to torture and punish their enemies. Three of the most gruesome methods from history include:
  

  Scaphism or The Boats: The condemned person was force fed milk and honey, stripped naked, then covered in more honey, before being sandwiched between two canoes and left in stagnant water. As soon as the trapped person began passing this liquid again, it would attract insects and worms, who would slowly devour the body from inside and out.
  

  Rat Torture: In the middle ages, people would place a metal cage filled with rats on top of the condemned person's chest. They would they heat the cage, which forced the rats to burrow through the victim's flesh to escape the heat.
  

  And the punishment of Balthasar Gerard, for assassinating William 'The Silent' of The House of Orange, was seen as particularly barbaric, even by 16th Century standards. Over the course of four days he was whipped, had his wounds smeared with honey and the honey licked off by a goat with a rough tongue, then had a weight of 150kg attached to each of his big toes, had shoes attached to his feet that were far too small for him (which were then heated on a fire causing them to crush his feet even further into stumps), he then had this skin around his feet removed, had his armpits branded, had burning bacon fat poured over him, had nails rammed under his finger and toe nails, had his right hand burned off with a red-hot iron, had his flesh torn from his bones with pincers in six different places, then was quartered and disembowelled alive, before finally having his heart torn from his chest and flung into his face, and his head cut off.